Cloud Business Case #5: How to make your customers key in the wholesale industry

Next in our blog series, sharing SAP customers’ business cases for cloud solutions.

Recently a large distributor in the wholesale industry with headquarters in Europe, selling more than 6,000 products in more than 40 countries around the globe equipped its sales force with SAP Cloud for Customer.

SAP Cloud for Customer helps you to align the whole organization and focus solely on customers. The front line to the customer need to harness the end-to-end enterprise, along with deep customer insight and personalized engagement. Airtime with customers is crucial for success.

Business Challenge(s)

With selling similar/comparable products as its competitors, our customer cannot win by differentiating its products. The key parameters to win are:

Differentiate by services

Identify the need before the competition

Differentiate by price

The customer’s dilemma was a CRM solution that didn’t support proper. No transparency into leading and differentiating parameters. Sales and marketing forecasting did not help either to gain the right insights. As a consequence their sales spend more time in the office finding deals or preparing promotions than engaging with the customer. Missing integration to ERP (e.g. Customer Buying History) has eaten the last bit of transparency.

Expected Outcome

To become THE customer oriented company (for office products). Furthermore they wanted to improve sales reps lives by introducing a strong and efficient customer engagement solution helping them to:

Make every sales team work with a single tool within the same corporate process

Share experience and share success in a service oriented market

Benefits

Key stakeholders were the group sales director, sales key users, the CEO, COO, and technical project teams from IT for support. Especially key users who tested the delivered POC (Proof of Concept) had a great user experience in terms of functional coverage (Entire Lead2Cash Process, Pipeline, Sales Forecast) and easy to use app also on mobile devices. Extending the usage to other departments like field sales or customer service is seen as big benefit.

Another important point to choose SAP over various competitors was the strong involvement of SAP Consulting and SAP Product Management. They built the value proposal, delivered a convincible POC and a strong SAP commitment to make it a success.

We are looking forward to deliver proof points after implementation has been finished. Stay tuned.